Josh’s Blog

A dear friend of mine is having a rough time right now. A very creative and talented recording artist, but currently weighed down by the onerous combination of the demands of artistic development and the realities of taking care of one’s self at the same time. In replying to a call for help and advice, one particular paragraph I wrote stands out in my mind as something I need to remember for myself:

Sometimes, those of us with great creative desires feel the urge and need to plough forward with our creations at any cost… to bring our desires and dreams to fruition as quickly as possible. We set (typically artificial) deadlines for ourselves to try to keep on track and give ourselves something concrete to aim for. But the world and process of the creative arts is anything but concrete, and it requires the absolute best of care and nurturing of the creator in order to achieve the absolute best of results. In most cases, even with outside support, this care still needs to come from within. There is only so much time, energy, and money available to us at any given moment, so it is important to pace ourselves and balance our focus to ensure only the best for our art and ourselves.

Sometimes I find myself disappointed with the timeframe within which I can tackle a new idea or task, expecting myself to have complete success and perfection on the first attempt. I will forego things important to sustaining myself in exchange for extra time or energy to put towards a given project. But in reality, I need to be equally careful not to fall into this trap. There is plenty of time to create and develop, and no one is putting extreme time pressures and expectations on me – at least no one but myself.

This isn’t to say that anyone should strive for anything less but the best, but to ensure that every plan is laid out in context, keeping everything else surrounding the plan in mind. I will forever have high expectations for myself, but perhaps I need to temper those expectations somewhat in order to keep them in line with the realities surrounding a given intent or project.

An amazing evening. Mike Nunan did an outstanding job of the live mix from the stadium. The opening sequence and the opening essay turned out really well. And overall, I was feeling just a bit overwhelmed hearing so much of my music mixing/production work being played back on air after so many months of hard work.

Having the lighting of the cauldron occurring just outside of the IBC was an amazing finish to the evening. I’m mixing the music for the Olympic Morning broadcast in about 2 hours, and setup was a couple hours ago. Yup, long day… been going for nearly 21 hours now. But definitely a good day (or, more accurately, days).

More photos on flickr…

A forewarning: This is going to be a seriously geeky post!

I’ve had a quite a few folks ask how the whole room is strung together, what Digidesign interfaces we are using etc. The short answer is none, as we’ve opted to use 3rd party solutions for getting audio into and out of Pro Tools, and have amassed a wealth of benefits and flexibility as a result.

The rig is centred on a distributed synchronous optical network called Optocore. They make various flavours of boxes that contain AES, MADI, or analog I/O, and all of the boxes interconnect using fibre optic cable into a redundant ring topology. You can have up to 700 meters between devices, with the ability to go up to 70 km in certain situations. The network (currently) will carry 512 channels of audio, 3 channels of video, a handful of serial control data, plus 100 Mbps ethernet. You can provide or accept word clock sync at any device, and each device has several serial ports as well as a video input and output. Since the entire ring is a distributed router, you can route any given input to as many outputs as you require – no mults or patch bay required.

In the control room, we have a MADI unit and an AES unit. The MADI unit has two sets of I/O, one of which is connected to the SSL Delta Link, allowing for 64 channels of I/O to Pro Tools. The other is connected to an SSL Alpha Link, providing 24 channels of analog conversion in each direction, plus an additional 24 channels of AES I/O.

The AES unit has 64 channels of connectivity, which you can mix and match as inputs or outputs in groups of 8 channels. It sounds like a lot of AES I/O, but when you have a large number of external digital devices (TC System 6000, multiple Dolby devices, etc.) it becomes necessary.

There’s an additional MADI unit in the Central Equipment Room providing interconnect with the central broadcast router, and bringing sync (synchronous video black and wordclock) into our setup.

Finally, we have a rolling stage rack that contains an AES base device. In that rack, we also have 20 channels of Neumann SolutionD digital microphone interfaces, 8 mic/line analog inputs, and 8 analog line outputs. All the interfaces and preamps are remote controllable from our suite, so despite the fact that the rack is nearly 300 metres away, we have full control as though they were in the same room as us, including mic pattern switching in the case of some of our digital mics. Very convenient when this room goes live to air during some music events, and the only cables that had to be run were a pair of fibres!

I don’t even want to think about what this would have taken to pull off in the days of using copper to string all of this gear together. Granted, trying to plan out and execute the routing matrix for all of the signals takes a bit of head scratching, but if you make a mistake or need to adjust to a new situation, all it takes is a click of the mouse – no soldering iron or patch cables required.

Just a couple of shots of the beautiful sunrise this morning in Vancouver.

Welcome to the Canadian Olympic Broadcast Media Consortium (COBMC) 5.1 Post Sound Suite. Today, I completed the build of this room, with only the task of testing out all of the wiring and interconnects tomorrow before being able to mark the task as done.

This mobile setup will be used to mix the features, promos, being cut by the many Avid editing suites at the IBC, as well as some live-to-air music performances during the games. It was also the rig used to record and mix the Olympic Themes Suite over the past several months.

For those interested in gear, the room is made up of:

• Pro Tools HD|4 Accel (although currently assembled from other rigs as an HD|6 in order to pull of the massive music mixes for the themes suite project)
• D-Control 16 with panner module
• Avid Mojo SDI
• SYNC HD
• SSL Alpha Link and Delta Link
• Optocore digital audio network for audio transport between racks, audio/video router matrix, and stagebox
• Dolby LM100, DP564, and DP570
• V-Mon monitor control plugin with V-Tac controller
• RTW Multichannel Meter
• K|H monitors plus K|H subwoofer
• Stagebox containing 20 channels of Neumann Digital Microphone Interfaces for using our selection of Solution D microphones

I opted not to bring my PMC TB2-A2 monitors out here since the K|H monitors work quite well for broadcast work, and PMCs would comprise a lot of extra gear to bring along. Not to mention, the PMCs are my own, so I would fear them getting damaged during transport. That said, the themes package was ultimately mixed on the PMCs back in Toronto, and I love those monitors.

The noisy bits (computer, expansion chassis, etc.) are located out in the hallway in a separate rack. The room is reasonably quiet given that it’s literally a set of partition walls and a drop ceiling set up in the giant convention centre, and given the minimal walls/ceiling, actually should provide a reasonable “virtual” air volume despite the smallish floor dimensions, which will hopefully minimize any acoustic oddities in the space.

Despite the relatively portable nature of the kit, it still takes a healthy amount of time to build, especially considering the time required to build the D-Control (which doesn’t normally leave CTV in Toronto).

Assuming I didn’t mix up any connections, we’ll be pushing sounds through the system by midday tomorrow!